Chaos Cipher (30 page)

Hattle
circled, jabbing into the air, his technique unsullied even with
the fresh injury. The bell rang and the first round came to an end,
dividing the fighters to their corners.

Edge Fenris
laughed and applauded with the plangent mob. Kyo however, hadn’t
been pleased by what he saw, even though he knew Hattle was
hurting, it wasn’t enough. His pride was still intact; he wanted to
see this shattered. But he couldn’t bring himself to fully enjoy
this bloodshed despite his hatred for Hattle. Some injuries he knew
left indelible scars. He wondered if his loss would make him an
even more insufferable bastard.

The bell drew
the fighters back to the centre of the ring and the Russianomai kid
balled his fists and upped the tempo. Hattle had to hop around
more, forced to the corners by powerful blows to the ribs, on the
ropes, taking more hits. He launched some hard hooks and a
roundhouse, all hitting the unyielding Russianomai kid’s arms and
blocks. At one point, the kid almost locked Hattle’s leg, but he
managed to reverse the hold and escape before it got out of hand.
Hattle laughed joyously as he bobbed on his toes, his guard still
down, tempting the Russianomai kid to break his nose. The kid
lurched forward, slinging his punch like a spear, sliding into an
uppercut that skimmed the bridge of Hattle’s nose, almost catching
him. It was all that Hattle needed.

In one mighty
swoop, Hattle lambasted the Russianomai fighter with a hulking blow
to the chin and the kid stumbled back, blinking away the blinding
stars clouding his vision. His guard came up, great bulwark arms
locked in before his face, but Hattle’s next punch slipped between
the arms like a missile through a canal lock, and the blood gushed
from the Russianomai ‘s nose. The kid sallied forth, feckless
punches rising over Hattle’s head as he dropped beneath them,
returning the blows with a redoubled ferocity. Hattle stomped on
the kid’s ankle and head-butted his forehead and finished it. The
Russianomai kid fell to his knee, castellated, forced down as
Hattle threw up his arms and walked a lap around the ring as the
finisher bell tolled. It was all over for the Russianomai hardland
fighter now keeling backwards like sawn timber. Hattle stood on his
chest, before the referees burst in to drag him away. Hattle
couldn’t hear the bells for his own hubris, he roared with laughter
and scorn in frightening and psychopathic gusto.

Psychopathic
gusto and bleeding lips.

-22-

C
olonel Max Elba entered the anchor
base accommodations. For military personnel like himself they
weren’t too shabby. He didn’t exactly have a minibar but there were
some brilliant neuro-ligature channels. He’d set himself down in
the small and dimly lit room after getting unchanged and decided to
access the local neurosphere interface. The Nexus server was like a
large blue triangle with its tip pointing down. It displayed a
holographic of a brain on the wall, as he pulled a hair-like wire
from one of its feeds and patched it to the tattoo on his neck. A
feed-back holographic displayed the Colonel’s cranial activity and
general mental health. It looked positive. He lay down on the bed
and accepted the Nexus link. The information flooded his mind,
digestible nodes of data spinning and shifting through his visual
cortex stimulated by the neurophase with the anchor base server. He
jumped from point to point until he found the access node he was
after titled communication outlets. And Max Elba channelled a
communication bridge to Mr Duval on the orbital station
Orandoré
. Once it was
set, the neurosphere enclosed and almost instantaneously Duval was
aware of everything Max had done regarding the mission. He’d
administered his usual semi-qualia setting; allowing Mr Duval to
review limited visual fields relevant only to the mission.
Satisfied, Duval confirmed the update registration.

‘
Mr Duval,
there’s something about these foot-finders that seem to be
incomplete.’

‘
What’s the
problem, Colonel?’ Duval asked.

‘
As you can
see, sir, these ambulation patterns are corrupted. Medina thinks
there may be a problem with the Erebus internal
chronometers.’

‘
Well, nobody
is working on the Erebus right now,’ said Duval. ‘Most of the crew
flatly refuse. They said they’re seeing things, losing track of
time and what not. One of my engineers went missing in that place
yesterday. Whatever it is about that Starnavis it has got people
spooked. We send drones in there and they never come back. We just
lose them; we’ve no idea where the hell they are.’

Max felt his
field of vision suddenly cloud over with optical visuals of
engineers working in the Erebus. He saw strange shadows and images
of hollow translucent figures stalking the corridors of the haunted
Starnavis. Max blinked away the images and closed the visual quale
neuromitted from Duval’s sensorium.

‘
What do you think
it is?
’

‘
Until we
investigate further we’re holding off on speculation. Ultimately
until we tear it up from the outside in, we’re staying out of that
place. Everything started going screwy the moment we began starting
up the core and electronics again. So we’re powering it down for
the time being.
’

‘
So there’s no
chance I can get the timers?
’ Max
requested.

‘
Unless somebody
already has that information I’d wager no.
’ Duval said. ‘
But by all means
inquire with the spanners.
’

‘
I’ll do just
that.
’

‘
Yeah, well I
suggest you do it personally. I want you back on the station with
your team. Got a job for you.
’

‘
What
job?
’

‘
Seems an
anonymous Erebus investor wants you to speak with Scott Barnes
about your research findings. This individual is willing to let you
in on some classified information about the Erebus provided you use
the limited information wisely.
’

‘
Of course,
sir.
’ Max Elba nodded.
‘
What sort of information are we talking
about here?
’

‘
Something called
the chaos cipher
,’ Duval said.
‘
Our investigation team have been trying
to put it together. We’ll let you look at the briefing first. Our
anonymous Erebus investor wants to know if your foot-finder
information can be useful towards helping understand the code’s
syntax and bring us closer to delineating what it does. Like I
said, you wanna speak to the spanners have at them, but according
to what we know our research team is saying the same thing about
the chaos cipher as you are about the foot-finders. That there’s a
missing piece, something is corrupted. Maybe Scott Barnes can fill
the gap.
’

‘
We shall
see,
’ said Colonel Elba.
‘
We’ll be departing ASAP, expected arrival
nineteen hours. See you soon, Mr Duval.
’

Max left the
communications semi-qualia transmission and retreated back into the
sensorium. He allowed the soft palliative information of this
neural space sooth over his mind, its calming and tranquil images
succouring his thoughts in the gentle neural rhythms before he shut
it down at last. Max found himself lying once more in his bed. He
reached behind his head and pulled the magnetic patch away from the
tattoo markings of his implant and the neuro-ligature wire
retreated back into a Nexus server mounted on the wall. Max put his
hands behind his head and found a spot on the ceiling to stare at.
What the hell had those Chrononauts been up to?

*

Three
thousand million miles from Earth, not far from the orbital path of
Neptune a dark chrome shell hurtles towards its destination. Before
the carrier was launched from the Solar Navy Alliance orbital
construction base, its saltus drive rings were already being
constructed out by Pluto’s locality. It was a project that had been
under initiation for over sixty years. Now the carrier Hephaestus
One, a two kilometre long tower of fuel tanks and maintenance
equipment and provisions, loomed at last towards its drive rings.
Its huge convex dish held the warped reflection of the stars, ready
to set forth into the shrunken giants of light. The equipment was
set to reach Kepler-186f, where a colony called Garisk was based
there in the constellation system, Cygnus. Exhaust casts flared
with lustrous brilliance as it drifted on the catered force of its
antimatter engines. The provisions ship was well serviced by an AI
known to the Earth as Adamoss.

He was a
singular and sophisticated AI contemporaneously operating a network
of avatar models, adroitly synchronising the many convoluted
functions of the vessel’s complexities. Some of his avatars were
designed with more strength features, others designed for improved
dexterity, only some of them anatomically humanoid in appearance.
They were composed of light-weight plastics and rubber, of silicon
and of carbon composite skeletons and meta-polymers. His functional
software spread throughout the cranial processors, remarkable
state-of-the-art quantum links. The vessel was destined to connect
to its three saltus-carrousel rings to begin its sixty eight
million mile velox from the fringes of the solar system, through a
warp path known as the Nebula Bridge. Yet it was at this point,
about the orbit of Neptune, the AI first encountered a unique
spatial phenomenon.

Originally
Adamoss had plotted a course to steer the provisions ship away from
the presumed asteroid, but then the phenomenon also altered course,
realigning to meet with Hephaestus One.

Now poised on
the reefs of the solar system, Adamoss gazed out at the Kuiper
belt’s capacious and sable expanse of stellar dust. He watched the
asteroid clusters and the backdrop of photonic maelstroms where
waves of radiation blustered out from the sun like the spores of
fire crashing through the dusty reaches of a borderless serenity.
His complicated optics changed to inlet the tiny dots unseen by any
good human eye, exposing the swirling red-shift galaxies afar. He
would blink and find another, eyes switching in a manner that was
all too similar to the physiognomy of his human creators yet much
more dynamic, contemplating far greater ranges than the human eye.
His fingers reached out to touch the glass where beyond was the
edgeless horizon of space, his black plastic nails meeting the
window surface to ignite with nanology, webbing the micro silicon
circuits with light, conducting a current from the transparent
material and operating a target crosshair onto the windowpane.
Adamoss shifted the crosshairs to align with the mysterious dark
patch of space from where the disturbance emanated, and then used
his other hand to expand the circular bubble and magnify the
location. Sure enough his eyes were not deceiving him. The
disturbance was real, and there were three of them.

The three
silver machines pursued in advance, dropping out of an incredible
pace and slowing to an approach vector. Adamoss was joined by the
windowpane with another one of his identical bodies, then another,
and another. Each of his avatars reached out their limbs and also
touched the observation window glass, each performing a different
function for the ship’s communication systems. The satellites began
to broadcast their signal and the android began his speech. His
voice was hollow, synthetic, labouring a natural human
tone.

‘
I am
Adamoss, maintenance operator AI for the human resource vessel
Hephaestus One, destined for Kepler-one-eight-six, f. You are on a
collision course. Identify the nature of your intentions and
coordinate a new trajectory.’

The three
objects showed no sign of compliance. They showed no signs of a
change in direction and their approach speed remained
consistent.

‘
I am
Adamoss, Artificial Intelligence and representative of Earth. Speak
your purpose.’ This time the message was intended to encompass a
translated encryption of every accounted language.

And no
message returned.

Adamoss took
a step back from the glass, then one at a time so too did the other
feet of his multiform duplicates. They looked at each other
blankly, and then focussed their attention back on the advancing
phenomena. At sixty kilometres from impact, the leading vessel
began to drop speed drastically and at just five hundred metres
came to a sudden and impossibly static position, as though somebody
had just hit the pause button on Adamoss’ optical sensors, and they
synchronised a reverse speed that matched the huge provisions ship
as though hovering in parallel superposition. Though Adamoss had
never seen a spatial body stop with such alacrity, he remained
unperturbed despite its infallible knowledge of human physics. Such
motions in Newtonian physics were yet unheard of and by all human
accounts impossible. But Adamoss knew better, this was indeed a
design far greater than Earther capacities.